| Description |
The biochemical and biopharmaceutical industries are growing rapidly, and promoting hands-on STEM education in high schools is essential in getting kids interested. One of the most common and easily understood experiments is separating DNA samples using gel electrophoresis. However, Utah has consistently had the lowest spending rates per student than any other state, and gel electrophoresis kits can sell for hundreds of dollars as they use expensive chemicals. Cheaper at-home kit created from other published sources are often made with random pieces of equipment and do not produce repeatable results. Therefore, producing a robust kit that can compete with these marketed kits at a fraction of the cost would open the doors for more hands-on labs in the classroom. This kit was produced using agar powder and baking soda as a substitute for the agarose powder and Tris-acetic acid-EDTA traditionally used to create the gels and buffer, and DNA samples were extracted from fruit samples using a salt/soap/water buffer. DNA purity was found to be too low, so food dye samples were substituted as the loading samples. Gel composition and gel thickness were varied in order to improve band separation. A 0.6 wt% agar-sodium bicarbonate gel with a thickness of 0.68 cm was found to produce the best results. When compared to the performance of the BioRad kit, the Experimental Design kit achieved 1.75 ± 0.16 times better band separation of the dye samples. The total run time of the experiment was approximately 35 ± 2.5 minutes, which can be reduced to 20 ± 0.5 minutes if the gels are cast beforehand. The final cost of all the materials necessary to perform exactly one run of electrophoresis was $9.36, a 92.6% reduction compared to the cost of the BioRad Kit. The 3D printed apparatus was also able to resolve most of the deficiencies observed in the BioRad ki |
